Jung: His Life and Work: A Biographical Memoir, Hannah, B. Books and Bookmen (1977)
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was the best German novelist since Goethe, a very popular writer whose books sold in millions. He must also have been a talented actor: his readings from his works attracted enthusiastic audiences.
Thomas and his brother Heinrich decided not to carry on the old family corn business in Lübeck, and when their father died at 51 the family moved to Munich. Thomas wrote Buddenbrooks when he was twenty five, a best seller about himself, his family and Lübeck, thinly disguised. All his life he must have offended people he knew, who found themselves caricatured in his novels.
Heinrich loved Italy, but it meant little to Thomas, child of the Protestant gothic north. He married a Jewess, Katja Pringsheim, his perfect and sympathetic wife for more than fifty years. They had six children. Nothing could have been more bourgeois than this large family living in the hideous house he built in Munich.
Thomas was 39 when the First World War began. He wrote enthusiastically for the Fatherland, saying it was a conflict between the German spirit and the material West, and defending the attack on neutral Belgium by comparing it with Frederick the Great’s on Saxony. He dreaded being called up, but never was. He denounced democracy, which he was afterwards to extol. There are political quotes for all seasons to be found in Thomas Mann. After the war he felt very German and nationalist until the early 20s, when National Socialism erupted. His hatred of the Nazis governed his life henceforward. In 1933 he left Germany to live in Switzerland and managed to get most of his manuscripts out. But a box was inadvertently left behind, which caused him sleepless nights, because it was full of diaries to which he confessed his secret.
This respectable family man, and much-admired writer, was homo-erotic. Although he remained buttoned up, never indulging in more than a hand clasp or a furtive hug, he dreaded the Nazis finding his confessions and blackening his character. They never did.
Nobody now, reading his story Death in Venice, could doubt where the writer’s sympathies lay, but when it was published in 1913 the permissive society was undreamt of. Thomas Mann minded deeply what people thought of him.
Was he tortured by impossible, unassuasive desire? Probably not. His wife, his children, his enormous success, his fame and fortune and his Nobel Prize were extremely important to him. His diaries are full of complaints about health, teeth, ears, nausea and various ill that flesh is heir to. Sex seems to have been a mild and harmless pleasure, though possibly he regretted never having known passion. Even before the first war he was in and out of clinics. There was nothing he liked better than a rich sanatorium—health was a major preoccupation, and the mise-en-scène of The Magic Mountain perfectly familiar.
From Switzerland he lectured all over Europe; on Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, Freud and Nietzsche. But as war approached he and Katia began to feel uncomfortably near Germany so they went to America, where they had a powerful benefactress in Agnes Meyer, whose husband owned the Washington Post. She smoothed the way for Thomas, even finding him a sinecure to ensure an adequate income. However, in return she wanted to be his muse, his mentor, his possessor. The unfortunate Thomas wrote her flattering letters, stayed with her, pretended to welcome her, while all the time confiding in his diary what a pest she was. Ronald Hayman, in his dry way, relates this richly comic episode to perfection.
The Manns lived in California and became American citizens. After the Second World War Thomas Mann, who knew nothing of the gulags, used to say he could happily live under communism. Accustomed to adulation as an anti-Nazi and Nobel Prize winner, he suddenly found the climate changed. Denounced by McCarthyites as soft on communism, his situation was like the 30s all over again. He longed to leave America, which he called ‘an air-conditioned nightmare’.
Eventually the Manns got back to Europe, and settled near Zurich. Thomas was showered with prizes and honorary doctorates.
A sort of jealousy shines out of the pages of Mann’s Goethe novel, Lotte in Weimar. Probably what he envied in his great predecessor was Goethe’s classic and uninhibited attitude to love, and that he went on falling in love when he was old and didn’t care who knew it, whereas Thomas had to make do with a glance at an attractive waiter, or a glimpse of a boy playing tennis. Whether he truly wished for more is something we shall never know; probably his inhibitions had become an integral part of him.
Ronald Hayman has written an excellent biography of the great storyteller.
Thomas Mann, Hayman, R. Evening Standard (1996)
The Pulse of Ideology
For a very large part of the world, there is now no ideology with pretensions to universality that is in a position to challenge liberal democracy—this is the theme, constantly repeated, of this optimistic book [The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama]. There are tables showing that more and more countries have succumbed to the charms and opportunities of liberal democracy, all of them rather rich and upwardly mobile. Their citizens enjoy freedom, and are no longer subject to the vague terrors of war.
Soviet Russia has fallen to bits, and revealed its appalling poverty and inefficiency to the delighted gaze of the more fortunate denizens of the West. Spengler should evidently have called his book The Downfall of the East.
China? Still by way of being communist, it has been obliged to allow a measure of market economy here and there, to keep things going. Perhaps we should not be too anxious for it to change. A glance further East than Russia can be rather alarming.
The brilliantly clever Japanese have pointed the way to Taiwan, South Korea and the rest of them. What Chairman Mao called ‘uneasy thoughts’ assail us in the comfortable, smug West. Can we compete? Are they too clever by half? What about their terrifying work ethic, just when we prefer the ethic of idleness? Might it interfere?
When the author speaks of ‘extremely powerful passions—religion and nationalism’, he is too politically correct to mention the dread word ‘race’. Yet race is as powerful as either of the others. Disraeli said ‘all is race’, and certainly this book bears him out.
Riches and prosperity and ease are the goal. The only worry left to those of us with no more history is that some demented little country might blow us up with its nuclear bomb, thus putting an end to history in a manner almost welcomed by Shaw at the end of his life, when he despaired of irrational man.
Democracy is nowhere defined, and it takes many forms. Universal suffrage is only a beginning, and solves none of our problems. Somebody has to make decisions, choice is of the essence. What Asquith called ‘the pervading influence of a commanding mind’ is extremely important in the enterprise of government. But commanding minds are rare. In the teeth of bitter opposition from a large proportion of his countrymen, General de Gaulle, for example, once in power, was a dictator for ten years. Yet France is ‘a democracy’.
Fukuyama dismisses local difficulties such as the Northern Ireland impasse, the hatred between Arab and Jew, the famine in Somalia, wars in the Balkans, and the hideous poverty in the very heart of America and the EC, as not particularly important. Some are soluble, others perhaps not. But he totally ignores the greatest and most intractable problem of our time: over-population.
He seems to be a clever don in a rich American university, becoming more and more optimistic as the old enemies and the cold war dissolve, while democracy advances with the calm firm tread Spengler once associated with Caesarism. Does he underrate the envy, hatred and malice in the world?
This enjoyable book is not unduly marred by the sort of jargon associated with American academics, though we could do without words like directionality, marketisation and explicated. It is pleasant to think that owing to the powerful scientific civilization created by the Europeans, the Americans and the Japanese, we can continue to be liberal democrats, and shall not be deprived of our harmless amusements, such as Prime Minister’s Question Time ‘live’ on the wireless. The cries of yes I did, no you di
dn’t, you’re another, and so forth, are the essence of the democratic process. So, for the matter, are American presidential elections. Small wonder we are the model and the envy of the entire world.
The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama, F. Evening Standard (1992)
A Gleam of Hope
Mr Wyndham Lewis’ first novel for fourteen years is, on the human level, as bitter and disillusioned as its title suggests. There can be no doubt that the author dislikes and despises people in general and English people in particular. Almost every character is a savage caricature, a grotesque. The central figure, Professor René Harding, is half French, and (as war-time England is, in a sense, the villain of the novel) this half-foreignness is evidently meant to mark his superiority. When war approaches, in 1939, he throws up his history professorship, because he disapproves so deeply of the war and the trend of events in Europe that he decides to start a new life in Canada. Why does he not continue to teach, and try to convert others to his point of view? Because he is nervous, vain, touchy, and—in the last resort—conventional. Feeling an atmosphere so hostile to him he retires before the fight begins.
In Canada, he and his wife are virtually prisoners for three years. They inhabit a room in a cheap hotel which they are too poor to leave, with no friends, no work, and no comfort, where they suffer deeply from the Canadian climate, which according to Mr Wyndham Lewis consists of ten months of bitter freezing winds and two months of glaring, panting heat accompanied by swarms of dangerous, stinging flies. Extremely unpleasant for both of them, these years are harder to bear for the wife than for the husband, as imprisonment must always be harder for those with empty heads than for those whose intellectual life is an unending adventure. Finally the dreadful squalid hotel is burned down; and when, soon after, René Harding is offered a chair of history at the local university, his wife, realising that Canada is to be their permanent lot and neurotically homesick for Kensington, chooses freedom by throwing herself under a lorry.
There are scenes which are so well described that they are unforgettable—the Hampstead dinner party, the hotel fire, the police morgue—but it is not these alone which are the point of the book. The loving care most writers lavish on their characters is reserved by Mr Wyndham Lewis for the ideas of his hero. Professor Harding, ‘outraged by the events of the past thirty years beyond endurance’, writes a book. In it he points out that: ‘History is the record of the quantitive… Unless the notion of significance can be detached from this misleading “quantity” association, no proper History can be written… If a new attitude were to be introduced, banishing the record of the silly, the criminal, or the commonplace (which, as it is, relegates History to the plane of a crime-yarn, a Western Story, or a body of statistics) then it would be necessary to attempt to expunge from our daily life, as far as possible, the things we condemn in History… He hoped that the discredit of a certain kind of event in the past would reflect forward (to some extent) to how we all acted today.’
He goes on: ‘We obviously would perish ignominiously if we continued as we were at present. We must train and compress ourselves in every way, and breed an animal superior to our present disorderly and untidy selves. He added that there was very little chance of our doing this, but that it was just worth stating that this is the only possible solution.’
The discussion of these neo-Nietzschean ideas makes this book unusual. For those who do not like didactic novels, perhaps it should be pointed out that they (the ideas) take up very little space; the remainder is full of dramas and melodramas; and of cads, mad charwomen, toughs, bearded Canadian pansies, thieves and murderers, revolving round the solitary figure of homo sapiens personified by Professor Harding. The result is an intelligent, funny, rather savage novel, deeply pessimistic about man as he is but with a gleam of hope for man as he might be.
Self Condemned, Lewis, W. (1954)
Champs Elysées
FRANCE
Yes, Wallis Was a Woman after All
The news that Michael Bloch, well known for his Windsor books and with access to the Windsor archives, had written a book to prove that the Duchess had been a man was startling. What had he discovered, and how? It conjured up the strangest vision among anyone who knew the Duchess (he did not know her) of a tiny man, a very thin midget, beautifully dressed in drag by Balenciaga, wearing a cleverly made wig, because few men could summon up enough hair for the bouffant style she favoured—but here the vision fades, and the real-life Duchess is remembered as she was, feminine and elegant.
The truth is, Michael Bloch does not say she was a man. He says she never had what other women have, but he doesn’t say she had what men have. He says that her three marriages were unconsummated. Of course, he is only guessing. Perhaps he advanced his theory as an excuse for dishing up once again the whole Windsor story, from Mrs Simpson’s meeting with the Prince of Wales, his passion for her, the abdication, their life together for thirty five years, her seemingly endless illness and her death ten years ago at the age of 90.
Wallis Warfield’s first marriage was to a very manly and rather brutal looking officer in the US airforce, Winfield Spencer. She was 20. If he had discovered on their wedding night that sexual intercourse was impossible because of some physical deformity, there can be little doubt he would have departed next day. He drank too much and was often violent; he would not have been violent to her had they been living as brother and sister. This is just a fact of life. The marriage failed because of his drinking, quite simply.
Mr Simpson was the sort of man who might well have married her in order to acquire an entertaining companion who was also a housekeeper of genius, but her marriage to Spencer was a love-match ruined by drink, hardly an unusual event.
The Duke’s love for her was so deep, and so obvious to anyone who saw them together, that it is no good pretending it had some abnormal physical reason. It lasted until he died and she looked after him superbly.
There are happy married couples in the world, and the Windsors are an outstanding example of this. It seems just as perverse to pretend she was a freak as to have pretended that she was not a royal highness, when legally she was.
Bloch writes well and there are plenty of photographs for the fans. It is the non-fans who may be slightly disappointed by the flimsy evidence he advances for his fantasy.
The Duchess of Windsor, Bloch, M. Evening Standard (1996)
‘Something Must Be Done’
Frances Donaldson’s biography of Edward VIII was published a few years ago, and now she has abridged the text, added many excellent illustrations, and given it the coffee table format. More than half the book is devoted to the abdication, the tone throughout being censorious. It is a book by a governess doing her best to be fair to her charge, and sometimes succeeding.
She describes the rather sad childhood, the aloof mother, the sergeant-major-like father, and the poor education bestowed upon the children of George V at York Cottage, the house Harold Nicolson called ‘a glum little villa’. She admits that the Prince of Wales had ‘a very real talent for natural feeling and natural behaviour in an impossibly artificial situation’, for the ‘narrow, nice line that, pursued with increasing confidence, would soon carry him to amazing heights of popularity almost all round the world.’ It is no exaggeration to say that he was idolised; in England, in the Dominions where he undertook exhausting tours and in fact everywhere he went. Many quotations here emphasise this. Lord Mountbatten said of him: ‘He had an absolutely magnetic charm.’ Being an idol is probably not as easy as it sounds.
The abysmal failure of successive British governments in the 20s and early 30s to deal with the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty and of unemployment is notorious. The Prince of Wales, like other ex-servicemen of the First World War, saw the suffering of his fellow-countrymen and doubtless felt (and it was the truth) that it was due to the inadequacy of government. When, as King, he spoke the famous words ‘Something must be done’, millions of people agreed and appr
oved; but the politicians, disliking the implied rebuke, murmured about bringing the Crown into politics.
When he came to the throne as Edward VIII he was already deeply in love with Mrs Simpson; it was a love which lasted every day of his life for nearly forty years. A great deal has been written about the abdication, and about his selfishness, and dereliction of duty, and putting his private happiness before his duty to his country, and all this is stressed here. It is a theory which does not stand up.
The point is continually made, that in a constitutional monarchy the monarch cannot play any political role. He must be ‘above politics’, in other words simply a figurehead and a living symbol. Suppose, for one moment, Edward VIII thought a war with Germany would be the disaster for us that it has proved to have been, he could have done nothing to prevent it had he remained on the throne. Even in purely domestic affairs he could not have interfered. ‘Something must be done’ was a cry wrung from him at the sight of ghastly despair in the distressed areas caused by political failure, but even that was disapproved of (perhaps rather naturally so) by a government which was convinced that nothing either would or could be ‘done’.
If this point is agreed, that the sovereign must on no account intervene in any way at all, and that the word ‘reign’ is nothing but a word left over from olden times, then it follows that it does not matter so much who the sovereign is, what matters is continuity. The proof is that six kings and queens in the last one hundred and forty years have all been popular and successful, yet all unlike one another.
Edward VIII had a strong sense of duty; he would undoubtedly have sacrificed his private happiness had he been an only son, for he was a firm believer in monarchy. Since he had three brothers, all of them married and each with a wife eminently suitable to be queen consort, there was no reason for his doing so. It was perfectly true that he could not fulfil the role of King without the help and support of the woman he loved (as he put it). A royal family is needed. He knew that the brother who was to succeed him, the future George VI, with Queen Elizabeth and the Princesses, would be ideal for England and for what was then the Empire; and so it proved.
The Pursuit of Laughter Page 30